{"id":575,"date":"2007-10-04T19:56:57","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T00:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/10\/04\/facebook-encounters\/"},"modified":"2007-10-05T08:24:57","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T13:24:57","slug":"facebook-encounters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/10\/04\/facebook-encounters","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Encounters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently spent some time on <a href=\"http:\/\/princeton.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=675462208\">Facebook<\/a>, primarily out of professional interest (<a href=\"http:\/\/princeton.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=1105179\">all<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=704915555\">the<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/mit.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=711783\">cool<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/stanford.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=210552\">attorneys<\/a> are doing it). (I&#8217;m also on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pub\/0\/6a8\/784\">LinkedIn<\/a>, but that seems less cool.) Among other odd results, I&#8217;ve been getting lots of friend requests from people I&#8217;ve had no contact with in ten &#8212; and sometimes twenty or more &#8212; years. I&#8217;m surprised by this because I&#8217;ve always been so easy to find.  I started my first &#8220;home page&#8221; in 1994, and as long as the idea of search engine rankings has existed, I&#8217;ve been at the top in searches for my name. I&#8217;ve also never made any attempt to hide my email address, and retained all addresses for nearly 15 years.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, people contact me on Facebook who never before did.<\/p>\n<p>I have two nonexclusive theories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Facebook just induces more searching for old friends than &#8220;the web at large.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Facebook allows you to reconnect with people for a minimum activation energy. You don&#8217;t have to write them an email, tell them about your life, or engage in conversation. You just click &#8220;add to friends&#8221; and you&#8217;re done. Maybe these people had found me in the past but just didn&#8217;t bother to let me know. In fact, in the case of some of these people with whom I haven&#8217;t communicated since middle school, I <strong>still<\/strong> haven&#8217;t communicated with them. We&#8217;re just Facebook friends.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Other ideas?<\/p>\n<p>I should add that I have made some genuine connections through Facebook as well. Earlier this week, I met a <a href=\"http:\/\/mixedmetaphors.net\/\">college friend <\/a>(whose website promises to return to service soon) for dinner whom I hadn&#8217;t seen in nearly ten years. I found out he was in town through Facebook.<\/p>\n<p><hints id=\"hah_hints\"><\/hints><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently spent some time on Facebook, primarily out of professional interest (all the cool attorneys are doing it). (I&#8217;m also on LinkedIn, but that seems less cool.) Among other odd results, I&#8217;ve been getting lots of friend requests from people I&#8217;ve had no contact with in ten &#8212; and sometimes twenty or more &#8212; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,43,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}